cully blvd

The route will include mostly residential stretches of Cully Boulevard and Alberta Street.(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

This fall, Northeast Portland will host a new experiment in humanizing streets: the city will open a one-day route from 42nd Avenue and Alberta to NE Cully Boulevard and Killingsworth just for walking.

“We want to give Portlanders a chance to see and experience their streets in a new way,” said Inna Levin, volunteer and outreach coordinator for the nonprofit advocacy group Oregon Walks, in a news release Tuesday. “We hope Cully Camina will be the start of something bigger, inspiring more people to walk and engage in their community.”

The free event is Sunday, Sept. 18, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Since there’s no Sunday Parkways scheduled in September this year (the fifth and final open streets event, Sellwood-Milwaukie Sunday Parkways, is set for Oct. 2) the new Cully event will in a sense be a sixth Sunday Parkways.

Cully Blvd is about 85 feet wide at the intersection of NE Mason.(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Residents are calling for the City of Portland to improve safety on what they call a “hazardous” stretch of Cully Boulevard after a man was struck and killed while trying to cross at Mason Street on Saturday night.[Read more…]

Portland is already tantalizingly close to providing a really solid biking connection from Northeast Portland’s working-class Cully neighborhood to the airport area.(Photos: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

This post is part of Gap Week, a special series made possible by our sponsors and subscribers.

Portland has a problem: like most U.S. cities, it’s been losing middle-wage jobs, especially the kind you can get without a fancy degree.

Many of the middle-wage, blue-collar jobs that remain are spread in industrial centers along the rivers with limited public transit access. And one of the most important clusters is one in Northeast Portland that many Portlanders know well: Portland International Airport.

The new buffer will be completed this week (brown area is parking lane).(Photo: PBOT)

The Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is taking advantage of a paving project to improve bicycle access on a major street in northeast Portland. On Friday, PBOT announced a new buffered bike lane is coming to NE Cully Blvd between Prescott and Failing streets.

This 1/3 mile stretch of road is being repaved and PBOT is taking the opportunity to re-stripe the road in order to make the bicycle lane wider and more comfortable. PBOT will add a three-foot wide buffer to the existing five-foot wide bike lanes. The start of this project is just south of the existing physically separated cycle-tracks on Cully Blvd which were completed nearly two years ago. According to PBOT, when coupled with the cycle-track, “the buffered bike lane will provide people riding bicycles with nearly one mile of separated bikeway.”

This new buffered lane will also help smooth out the jarring emotional transition from the cycle-track to a standard, door-zone bike lane. It’s important to note that there are two schools nearby: Harvey Scott and Rigler.

To get the space for the wider bike lane, PBOT reduced the center turn lane from 15 to 10 feet and narrowed the two standard vehicle lanes (total road width is 66-feet).[Read more…]